Only if you're going to Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory to fix me up, Josh thought but decided to obey when his hands flattened into chocolate-chip cookies.

After 10 minutes or so, the woman and Josh arrived at a cave. She turned around and looked at him straight in his Gummi Bear eyes.

"Listen," she whispered, looking around them once more. "I need you to retrieve something for me in that cave. I cannot go in, but you can."

"Why me?" Josh said with a shiver. No, he was not terrified. His shoulders had just turned into a couple of ice-cream sandwiches. He didn't care what he had to do; he wanted to be human again!

"You must, because this cave's prophecy says, 'The Bewitched of the Bewitcher, come forth and claim your freedom. Retrieve and return to your Bewitcher her most valued need. Break free of her black-magic bars on Hallows Eve.'

"In other words, you must go in there and bring me back a potion."

"What kind of potion?"

Josh asked. It was a little hard to talk, considering his teeth had morphed into Smarties.

"A youth potion," the woman answered.

Obviously, Josh thought.

"Now, hurry! Before it is too late for you!"

She gave him a quick push on his shoulders (a squishy one, I might add), and he tiptoed into the middle of the cave. It was dark and damp. He could hardly see anything.

Until he reached the end . . .

There was a sparkling, green tube of light sitting on a rock. As Josh approached it, he saw that it was liquid.

"The potion!" he thought excitedly.

He grabbed it in one swift motion and rushed to the cave's entrance. The witch was waiting for him there, and a greedy smirk stretched across her age-worn face.

"Good, good . . .," she whispered as her long, bony fingers laced around the bottle.

She uncorked the glowing cylinder with a fingernail and sipped the neon juice until only a centimeter was left shimmering at the bottom. She then reached up and plucked a half-blond, half-silver piece of her hair. The strand slipped from her fingers and slid to the bottom of the bottle, swirling into the potion.

She handed it to Josh.

"What is it?" he asked.

"Your cure," the witch said, smiling as her deep wrinkles filled out.

She turned once in the darkness and was gone.

Josh had no more questions. He raised his Gummi-Worm-and-chocolate-chip-cookie hand holding the potion to his mouth and gulped it down. After the sour-apple taste hit his Hershey's-bar tongue, he immediately began to change.

His eyes resumed their normal look and feel; the skin from his shoulders to his fingertips returned; his toes became humanlike again; his ear returned to his head and was flesh along with the other one; his teeth resumed their hard enamel and rectangular shape; his tongue became pink and flexible once more. (Not that I couldn't have lived with the chocolate one, Josh thought happily.)

The next day at school, Josh didn't breathe a word about the previous night. When asked by his friends where he had been, he merely told them he had chewed on a bad piece of gum and gotten terribly ill. There was some truth in that, right?

In science class, their teacher was out. Instead, they had a substitute. She was rather a young woman with golden-blond hair and a satisfied smile on her face. She looked strangely familiar . . .

Josh didn't need to ask when he saw her. He already knew.

The sub asked the students if they had a nice Halloween. When everyone nodded

simultaneously, she asked if anyone accepted candy from strangers. As a handful of students nodded sullenly, Josh just smiled. He knew that she knew.

And she smiled right back at him.

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